Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“It’s better he don’t have no more run-ins with Chug Rollins.”

“You’re in trouble because of Ronnie and me. I’m sorry for what I said earlier.”

“I don’t pay them East Enders no mind.”

She seemed smaller now, somehow vulnerable, the light shining on the red streaks in her hair, hollowing one cheek with shadow.

“When it rains I see Cholo in the ground. His casket was made of plywood and cheesecloth. I keep seeing it over and over in my mind,” she said.

“You all right, Essie?”

“No. I don’t think I’ll ever be all right. You didn’t like Cholo. Not many people did. But he was brave in ways other people don’t understand.”

Lucas started to speak, then paused and unconsciously wet his lips, realizing, for the first time, that no words he spoke to her would have any application in her life. The light from the overhead bulb seemed to reveal every imperfection and blemish in her person and his own and make no difference. He couldn’t translate the thought into words, but for just a moment he knew that intimacy and acceptance had nothing to do with language. The linoleum felt cool under his bare feet, the warm, green smell of summer puffing on the wind through the screens. He put his arms around her and felt her press against him as though she were stepping inside an envelope. He rubbed his face in her hair and kissed the corner of her eye and moved his hand down her back. Her breasts and abdomen touched against him and he swallowed and closed his eyes.

“Maybe you ain’t seeing things real good right now. Maybe it ain’t a time to make no decisions,” he said.

Her hand left him for only a moment, brushing the wall switch downward, darkening the kitchen. Then she rose on the balls of her feet and kissed him hard on the mouth, squeezing herself tightly against him, her eyes wet on his chest for no reason that he understood.

Go figure, he thought.

23

Lucas told me all this the following morning, which was Sunday, while he swept the gallery and carried sacks of grass seed from the pickup bed into the shade. I sat on the railing with a glass of iced tea in my hand and watched him rake the dirt in the yard in preparation for seeding it.

“She told you Cholo was brave?” I said.

“He was her brother. What do you expect her to say?”

“His conscience was his bladder. He burned four firemen to death. The firemen were brave, not the guy who killed them.”

Lucas worked the rake hard into the soil, the muscles in his arms knotting like rocks. He breathed through his nose.

“Why’d you come out here, anyway? To stick needles in me?” he said.

“Chug and those others will come after you.”

“They ain’t good at one-on-one.”

“They don’t have to be,” I said.

He threw the rake down and split open a bag of seed with a banana knife and began scattering seed around the yard.

“You’re down on Esmeralda ’cause of her race. It’s bothered you from the get-go,” he said.

“Criminality is a mind-set. It doesn’t have anything to do with race. She’s been around criminals most of her life and she instinctively defends them. Don’t buy into it.”

“I’m telling you to lay off her, Billy Bob.”

“L.Q. Navarro was a Mexican. He was the best friend I ever had, bud.”

He slung the rest of the seed around the yard, whipping the burlap empty, then stooped over to rip open another sack. When he did, he said something I couldn’t hear, words that were lost in the shade and the muted echo off the house, words that I didn’t want to ever recognize as having come from his throat.

“What did you say?” I asked.

He unhooked the knife from the split in the burlap and stood erect, his cheeks burning.

“I didn’t mean it,” he replied.